This course provides a deeper exploration of mechanical assemblies and simulation, which are key engineering features of the design and manufacturing process. The foundation of engineering design is exploration and iteration. Design is rarely a perfectly linear and straightforward process. In this course, we'll explore mechanical assembly design and simulation, focusing on testing and improving design components and performance. As we move through design assumptions, testing, and refining design ideas, we'll come closer to a final design, while developing a deeper knowledge in Autodesk® Fusion 360™ for simulating and analyzing product functionality.
After completing this course, you will be able to:
• Describe the engineering design process and workflow in Fusion 360.
• Summarize the trends that are influencing the design industry.
• Demonstrate knowledge and skills in more advanced Fusion 360 CAD and simulation skills

RT

Worth taking this course if you are interested and curious about Engineering Design and Fusion 360.

LG

Feb 20, 2019

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

This is probably the best designed part of the course.

From the lesson

Design Optimization

Just because a design looks complete, doesn’t mean that it’s done. Often times you will go through dozens of revisions before achieving the final result. We'll explore ways to optimize the strength and reduce the weight of our quadcopter design, and we'll pull from experience to help guide design decisions.

Taught By

Autodesk Education

Transcript

In this lesson, we'll work on locating the flight controller. After completing this lesson, you'll be able to use sketch slice and project an edge. Let's carry on working on our component tray by making sure we have a positive location for the flight controller. The flight controller location is a little bit difficult because we have the power distribution board underneath it. Now remember, we are working with a 3D print so that does give us the flexibility because we can create geometry above the power distribution board even though it wouldn't be able to be manufactured in any other way. We just need to ensure that we have enough room to get the power distribution word in and that we can hold the flight controller. So what I want to do is I want to start by again selecting the bottom face of the flight controller by holding down the left mouse button and selecting that face and creating a new sketch. And when I do this, we can see exactly where the edge of the power distribution board is. And I want to select it, and hit P to project it into our sketch. Now, in general, I don't like to project geometry from other components unless absolutely have to especially if I end up having to move them around because we'll move them around with a modified feature using move copy and that will not go back and retroactively update the sketches. They have to fall in line in the timeline. So I generally avoid it unless I have a very good reason. But in this case, I want to make sure that I have this edge located and in this case, I'm not going to be moving anything else around. I've already done due diligence and made sure that they're centered on my entire device for the flight controller and I made sure that the power distribution board is about where I want it. So now that we have these locations, I want to make sure that I can positively locate the flight controller and I'm going to start by sketching a rectangle and I want to make sure that this rectangle is coincident. But I want to make sure that it's coincident with the correct points. And you notice that it's automatically trying to snap to a certain location and I don't like where it's trying to snap to. So when it controls the in and do I want to make sure that I snapped to this end location point. I'm going to then take this point I'm going to zoom in or drag it until it snaps to the end of that line. And that way it's fully defined. Now this section here is going to be a little bit interesting because we're going to have to carry this wall up pretty far. So instead of doing a very thin extrude like we did with those other three millimeters extrudes, I'm going to make it a bit thicker. I want to make it, I'm going to go ahead and hit D on the keyboard and I want to make this five millimeters but I'm going to take a line and I'm gonna come down and I want to take away some material. And the reason I want to do this is because I'll get the structure I need without having all the additional weight. So I'm going to again hit D on the keyboard and I'm going to dimension this in at three millimeters and I'm going to dimension this one in as well at three millimeters. Then, I want to take this and I'm going to make this three as well. That way I have this small section here which it's not removing that much but it's still enough that it could potentially make a difference. This is going to go all the way up and it's going to make sure that I have a positive stop for the front of the flight controller. I also need to make sure that I have a positive stop for the science but I need to be aware that I have a cable that's going to have to plug into the computer when I program the flight controller, and I also have a connector that goes from here and it goes all the way over to the receiver from the ground station from the controller. So I have to be aware that I can't really put much in this area, I can only have a small amount that can block here but I have a little bit more freedom on the right hand side. So we're going to start with a rectangle and I'm going to snap to this and then I'm going to start giving it a few dimensions and then it come down two millimeters from that edge, I'm going to come down a total of five millimeters and I'm going to give this a distance of three millimeters. Now, again, it slightly interferes with what we see here but this is actually a plug and then there are going to be cables coming out of it. So this will be okay, it really won't get in the way and remember we have enough room to let this float back and forth if we need to. So we have enough flexibility here. Now, this section is going to come all the way up. And again, what we're doing is we're allowing it to have a positive stop on the one side but we only want to add the geometry that we need to make this happen. On the other side, we'll do this as well but this time what I actually want to do is I want to come and take this edge and I want to come out a bit farther with this one and say okay. Now again, I'm going to come in and dimension this and this time I'm going to go five millimeters here and I'm going to go all the way down to eight here and I'm going to leave that as a solid block. And the reason I want to do that is because we potentially have to either file down or shave a little bit of material off of the side here to make sure that this fits nicely. I want to make sure that the flight controller has a nice tight fit and that I positively locate this end here. I'm not going to be able to do anything on the backside because it is over the power distribution board. So I have to be sure that the front is positively located and I'm potentially going to use double sided tape or maybe something else to fix it here. So this location and the orientation is critical to make sure that everything flies like it's supposed to. The last thing that we want to do is we want to make a shelf for the bottom side so it has something to rest on as well. Now, again, we can only go so far because of where the power distribution board is but we're going to take that reference edge and we're going to go ahead and we're going to draw a rectangle. And I'm not going to snap into anything just yet, I'm just going to simply come down and then I can snap to this edge right here. And with this, I want to come from here and make these two coincident I'm going to do the same thing on the other side. I'm going to make it coincident with this and I'll do the same thing on the top, make it coincident there. So now what we have is a sketch that we can take from the flight controller face, we can extrude it all the way down and then we can reuse that same sketch and we can extrude this section up. So we're going to stop our sketch, we're going to hide the flight controller which is the Micro CC3D and we're going to create an extrude. And we want to take all of these reagents, even the small section here and we're going to take those all the way down and we're going to go a distance to object and see the inside face. We're going to join those and then inside of our sketches folder, we want to make sure that we go back to the last sketch. In this case, it's Sketch26. We'll show that and we'll do an extrude one more time and this time, we'll bring these faces up and if we need to, we can go back and we can show the micro CC3D and see how far up they actually need to go. We will need to account for the thickness of whatever double sided tape we'll be using. Now in this case, it's going to be less than a millimeter. So as long as we go at least halfway up, we should have a nice positive location. I'm going to go in this case to minus 10 and I'm going to say okay. Now at this point, you might be wondering one thing and you might be wondering why I didn't connect these edges, why don't I just go ahead and wrap this all the way around. Well in this case, I'm actually going to leave those unattached so that way when I press the CC3D in or I try to place it in here, they can flex a little bit. I'm going to come in to modify and I want to create a chamfer on all of these edges, and I'm going to make just a small chamfer, we're going to do one millimeter and say okay, and that way when I try to put the CC3D in there what I'm actually doing is I'm making sure that it goes in and it doesn't hang up on those edges. Now, it's not super critical because the backside is actually open but for right now I want to make sure that I account for that. You also notice that we have some slight interference with the power distribution board. This is a micro USB connector on the power distribution board and the power distribution board can actually go in multiple orientations. Now in this case, I actually want to make sure that I leave enough room for it so I am going to cut some of this material away. Now in order to do that, we can do it a few different ways. We can hollow out the underside of this so we only have into the top shelf where we're going to actually adhere to or we can simply take this extrude and move it back a little bit. So to start this process, I'm going to press pull, I'm going to grab this face and I want to move it back one millimeter and I want to take a look at it from the top and see if I have enough clearance here. Now it's still pretty tight and assuming the model of the power distribution board is right, I want to make sure that I give it a little bit more clearance and I go back to one and half. The next thing that I want to do is create an extrude on this face by creating a new sketch. And notice that what I have from my options are create sketch and extrude. Now in this case, I want to start a new sketch and one tool that I want to use as this slice option which will automatically take away everything in front of that sketch plane. So we're going to take this face and I'm going to use this sketch offset and notice that when I do that, I can select that entire edge and I can bring it in minus 2 millimeters. I then want to take a line and go straight down and I'll do this on the other side as well. Now once we have those lines, then rotate it back and I want to extrude this out. Now depending on what objects are in your way you might need to rotate it around, I'll hold on the left mouse button. But what I want to do is I want to actually take that through. So this way I'm not adding a ton of mass to the extrude and I'm going to take it partially through into this wall because that's enough structure right there I don't need to have all that material there and I'm going to cut through that. So let's go and save this so we don't lose any of our work and move on to the next step.

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